With the start of a new two-year budget cycle, the Oak Harbor council is revisiting the 32-priority list made during previous budgeting discussions.

An exercise in narrowing the original list, which drew criticism for its kitchen-sink approach, proved to be difficult as the council couldn’t come to a consensus during a lengthy discussion at a workshop meeting Wednesday.

A draft of the overarching priorities, which came out of a retreat in February, have now been broken into three categories. The first is central development area; the second is the marina, recreation center, infrastructure, facilities, quality and safety; the third is housing, affordability and a representative form of government.

According to Mayor Pro Tem. Tara Hizon, there was some frustration surrounding how these new priorities were drafted.

“It was council’s retreat, and we went with council’s goals, and nobody asked council for feedback on what kinds of things we wanted to see on the agenda or discuss,” she said at a recent city workshop. “We didn’t have any part in that planning, and we all came prepared with our goals, at least I did. I had my long term goals and my short term goals. I had a whole list, and they said you can only pick three and then re-worded the ones we did submit. Anyway, it was really disappointing.”

Councilmember Eric Marshall said it felt like they were being “talked to” as opposed to having a conversation.

Regarding what did come from the retreat, while many of these new priorities will take longer than two years, the city primarily wants to set them in order to plan a two-year budget, said Interim City Administrator Sabrina Combs.

According to Councilmember Bryan Stucky, completely scrapping the old priority list is not productive.

“That’s a lot of whiplash for staff, but at the same time it’s certainly not right to say ‘hey, you new councilmembers, here are the new plans for the next four years, thanks for coming.’ You should have input too,” he said.

Several of the priorities set previously, such as the possibility of an aquarium, could be knocked out in a single conversation, he said, so it’s worth revisiting them.

“I’d rather just forget about (the new priorities draft), just chalk it up to a loss, go with the priorities we have,” he said.

The new priorities aren’t a major divergence from the old list, Marshall said, just a narrowed down version.

Stucky would prefer to address smaller items on the old list before they are forgotten with the new list. There was no reason for the old list to be so bloated, he said.

“I felt we took the easy, one could say lazy, way out, and say ‘oh, we’ll just add them all on there,’” he said. “We should have hashed them out better, and that’s on us.”

Despite the lengthy list, Councilmember Jim Woessner said they did pretty well addressing those items in the last two years.

“There was some criticism of 32 priorities,” he said. “It’s not the norm, right? It almost made it sound like we are a bit scatter-brained and we weren’t able to give clear direction, but the reality is if we look at those 32 items, I think we can put checkmarks next to a good majority of them, either we accomplished or we made progress on.”

The new list needs more specificity and tangible marks of accomplishment, he said.

It should be sorted by simple, manageable fixes and ones that will take longer planning, Stucky said.

Addressing individual items on the list, Councilmember Shane Hoffmire said that a new city hall, within the second category of priorities, should be part of a feasibility study. Earning public support will help such a project.

“It seems like it’s always horribly unpopular to go to the voters and ask for a new Taj Mahal or a new municipal services center if you will, but with the feasibility survey for the rec center, I do wonder if there’s some room in there to see if it’s feasible to include a new city hall in that rec center,” he said.

Within the same category is the development of a new recreation, pool and civic center. According to Marshall, that’s too many uses for a single facility.

“I don’t see it as being a recreation center-slash-city hall-slash-civic center,” he said. “I don’t know where the idea of a pool came from. We have a pool, and I really don’t want to compete with North Whidbey Parks and Rec.”

When they received funding for a feasibility study for the recreation center, it was just that, he said, and not the other things.

Housing should not be an official priority, he said.

“I don’t know how we’re going to fix that problem. We are not developers. We can’t create housing. We can’t force developers to do certain things. We really have to look at our codes so we can perhaps get that multiple family tax exemption done, but other than that this is not an issue we can fix as council,” he said. “If we could, then we would have the magic bullet that the whole rest of the state is going to use, and we just don’t have that.”

While they may not be able to single-handedly solve the issue, as a council, they should go out of their way to encourage or incentivize mixed use housing, Hizon said.

The new priorities are not ready to be set in stone, said Mayor Ronnie Wright. Council will discuss them again at the next workshop at the end of the month.